Chapter 189

When this was determined on, his desire was nearly irresistible to see Ruth Leigh; he thought it would be cowardly to disappear and not say good-by. Indeed, it was necessary to see her and explain the stoppage of help from the Margaret Fund. The check that he had drawn, which was returned, had been for one of Dr. Leigh's cases. With his failure to elicit any response from Mrs. Henderson, the hope, raised by the newspaper comments on the unexecuted will, that the fund would be renewed was dissipated.

In the interview which Father Damon sought with Dr. Leigh at the Women's Hospital all this was explained, and ways and means were discussed for help elsewhere.

"I wanted to talk this over with you," said Father Damon, "because I am going away to take a rest."

"You need it, Father Damon," was Ruth's answer, in a professional manner.

"And--and," he continued, with some hesitation, "probably I shall not return to this mission."

"Perhaps that will be best," she said, simply, but looking up at him now, with a face full of tender sympathy.

"I am sure of it," he replied, turning away from her gaze. "The fact is, doctor, I am a little hipped--overworked, and all that. I shall pull myself together with a little rest. But I wanted to tell you how much I appreciate your work, and--and what a comfort you have been to me in my poor labors. I used to hope that some time you would see this world in relation to the other, and--"

"Yes, I know," she interrupted, hastily, "I cannot think as you do, but--" And she could not go on for a great lump in her throat. Involuntarily she rose from her seat. The interview was too trying. Father Damon rose also. There was a moment's painful silence as they looked in each other's faces. Neither could trust the voice for speech. He took her hand and pressed it, and said "God bless you!" and went out, closing the door softly.

A moment after he opened it again and stood on the threshold. She was in her chair, her head bowed upon her arms on the table. As he spoke she looked up, and she never forgot the expression of his face.

"I want to say, Ruth"--he had never before called her by her first name, and his accent thrilled her--"that I shall pray for you as I pray for myself, and though I may never see you again in this world, the greatest happiness that can come to me in this life will be to hear that you have learned to say Our Father which art in heaven."

As she looked he was gone, and his last words remained a refrain in her mind that evening and afterwards--"Our Father which art in heaven" --a refrain recurring again and again in all her life, inseparable from the memory of the man she loved.

XXII

Along the Long Island coast lay the haze of early autumn. It was the time of lassitude. In the season of ripening and decay Nature seemed to have lost her spring, and lay in a sort of delicious languor. Sea and shore were in a kind of truce, and the ocean south wind brought cool refreshment but no incentive.

From the sea the old brown farmhouse seemed a snug haven of refuge; from the inland road it appeared, with its spreading, sloping roofs, like an ancient sea-craft come ashore, which had been covered in and then embowered by kindly Nature with foliage. In those days its golden-brown color was in harmony with the ripening orchards and gardens.

Surely, if anywhere in the world, peace was here. But to its owner this very peace and quietness was becoming intolerable. The waiting days were so long, the sleepless nights of uncertainty were so weary. When her work was done, and Edith sat with a book or some sewing under the arbor where the grape clusters hung, growing dark and transparent, and the boy played about near her, she had a view of the blue sea, and about her were the twitter of birds and the hum of the cicada. The very beauty made her heart ache. Seaward there was nothing--nothing but the leaping little waves and the sky. From the land side help might come at any hour, and at every roll of wheels along the road her heart beat faster and hope sprang up anew. But day after day nothing came.

Perhaps there is no greater bravery than this sort of waiting, doing the daily duty and waiting. Endurance is woman's bravery, and Edith was enduring, with an almost broken but still with a courageous heart. It was all so strange. Was it simply shame that kept him away, or had he ceased to love her? If the latter, there was no help for her. She had begged him to come, she had offered to leave the boy with her cousin companion and go to him. Perhaps it was pride only. In one of his short letters he had said, "Thank God, your little fortune is untouched." If it were pride only, how could she overcome it? Of this she thought night and day. She thought, and she was restless, feverish, and growing thin in her abiding anxiety.

It was true that her own fortune was safe and in her control. But with the usual instinct of women who know they have an income not likely to be ever increased, she began to be economical. She thought not of herself; but of the boy. It was the boy's fortune now. She began to look sharply after expenses; she reduced her household; she took upon herself the care of the boy, and other household duties. This was all well for her, for it occupied her time, and to some extent diverted her thoughts.

So the summer passed--a summer of anxiety, longing, and dull pain for Edith. The time came when the uncertainty of it could no longer be endured. If Jack had deserted her, even if he should die, she could order her life and try to adjust her heavy burden. But this uncertainty was quite beyond her power to sustain.

She made up her mind that she would go to the city and seek him. It was what he had written that she must not on any account do, but nothing that could happen to her there could be so bad as this suspense. Perhaps she could bring him back. If he refused, and was angry at her interference, that even would be something definite. And then she had carefully thought out another plan. It might fail, but some action had now become for her a necessity.

Early one morning--it was in September-she prepared for a journey to the city. This little trip, which thousands of people made daily, took on for her the air of an adventure. She had been immured so long that it seemed a great undertaking. And when she bade good-by to the boy for the day she hugged him and kissed him again and again, as if it were to be an eternal farewell. To her cousin were given the most explicit directions for his care, and after she had started for the train she returned to give further injunctions. So she told herself, but it was really for one more look at the boy.

But on the whole there was a certain exhilaration in the preparation and the going, and her spirits rose as they had not done in months before. Arrived in the city, she drove at once to the club Jack most frequented. "He is not in," the porter said; "indeed, Mr. Delancy has not been here lately."

"Is Major Fairfax in?" Edith asked.

Major Fairfax was in, and he came out immediately to her carriage. From him she learned Jack's address, and drove to his lodging-house. The Major was more than civil; he was disposed to be sympathetic, but he had the tact to see that Mrs. Delancy did not wish to be questioned, nor to talk.

"Is Mr. Delancy at home?" she asked the small boy who ran the elevator.

"No'me."

"And he did not say where he was going?"

"No'me."

"Is he not sometimes at home in the daytime?"

"No'me."

"And what time does he usually come home in the evening?"

"Don't know. After I've gone, I guess."

Edith hesitated whether she should leave a card or a note, but she decided not to do either, and ordered the cabman to take her to Pearl Street, to the house of Fletcher & Co.

Mr. Fletcher, the senior partner, was her cousin, the son of her father's elder brother, and a man now past sixty years. Circumstances had carried the families apart socially since the death of her father and his brother, but they were on the most friendly terms, and the ties of blood were not in any way weakened. Indeed, although Edith had seen Gilbert Fletcher only a few times since her marriage, she felt that she could go to him any time if she were in trouble, with the certainty of sympathy and help. He had the reputation of the old-fashioned New York merchants, to whom her father belonged, for integrity and conservatism.

It was to him that she went now. The great shop, or wholesale warehouse rather, into which she entered from the narrow and cart-encumbered street, showed her at once the nature of the business of Fletcher & Co. It was something in the twine and cordage way. There were everywhere great coils of ropes and bales of twine, and the dark rooms had a tarry smell. Mr. Fletcher was in his office, a little space partitioned off in the rear, with half a dozen clerks working by gaslight, and a little sanctum where the senior partner was commonly found at his desk.

Mr. Fletcher was a little, round-headed man, with a shrewd face, vigorous and cheerful, thoroughly a man of business, never speculating, and who had been slowly gaining wealth by careful industry and cautious extension of his trade. Certain hours of the day--from ten to three--he gave to his business. It was a habit, and it was a habit that he enjoyed. He had now come back, as he told Edith, from a little holiday at the sea, where his family were, to get into shape for the fall trade.

Edith was closeted with him for a full hour. When she came out her eyes were brighter and her step more elastic. At sundown she reached home, almost in high spirits. And when she snatched up the boy and hugged him, she whispered in his ear, "Baby, we have done it, and we shall see."

One night when Jack returned from his now almost aimless tramping about the city he found a letter on his table. It seemed from the printing on the envelope to be a business letter; and business, in the condition he was in--and it was the condition in which he usually came home--did not interest him. He was about to toss the letter aside, when the name of Fletcher caught his eye, and he opened it.

It was a brief note, written on an office memorandum, which simply asked Mr. Delancy to call at the office as soon as it was convenient, as the writer wished to talk with him on a matter of business, and it was signed "Gilbert Fletcher."

"Why don't he say what his business is?" said Jack, throwing the letter down impatiently. "I am not going to be hauled over the coals by any of the Fletchers." And he tumbled into bed in an injured and yet independent frame of mind.

But the next morning he reread the formal little letter in a new light. To be sure, it was from Edith's cousin. He knew him very well; he was not a person to go out of his way to interfere with anybody, and more than likely it was in relation to Edith's affairs that he was asked to call. That thought put a new aspect on the matter. Of course if it concerned her interests he ought to go. He dressed with unusual care for him in these days, breakfasted at the cheap restaurant which he frequented, and before noon was in the Fletcher warehouse in Pearl Street.

He had never been there before, and he was somewhat curious to see what sort of a place it was where Gilbert carried on the string business, as he used to call it when speaking to Edith of her cousin's occupation. It was a much more dingy and smelly place than he expected, but the carts about the doors, and the bustle of loading and unloading, of workmen hauling and pulling, and of clerks calling out names and numbers to be registered and checked, gave him the impression that it was not a dull place.

Mr. Fletcher received him in the little dim back office with a cordial shake of the hand, gave him a chair, and reseated himself, pushing back the papers in front of him with the air of a very busy man who was dropping for a moment one thing in order to give his mind promptly to another.

"Our fall trade is just starting up," he said, "and it keeps us all pretty busy."

"Yes," said Jack. "I could drop in any other time--"

"No, no," interrupted Mr. Fletcher; "it is just because I am busy that I wanted to see you. Are you engaged in anything?"

"Nothing in particular," replied Jack, hesitating. "I'd thought of going into some business." And then, after a pause: "It's no use to mince matters. You know--everybody knows, I suppose--that I got hit in that Henderson panic."

"So did lots of others," replied Mr. Fletcher, cheerfully. "Yes, I know about it. And I'm not sure but it was a lucky thing for me." He spoke still more cheerfully, and Jack looked at him inquiringly.

"Are you open to an offer?"

"I'm open to almost anything," Jack answered, with a puzzled look.

"Well," and Mr. Fletcher settled back in his chair, "I can give you the situation in five minutes. I've been in this business over thirty years --yes; over thirty-five years. It has grown, little by little, until it's a pretty big business. I've a partner, a first-rate man--he is in Europe now--who attends to most of the buying. And the business keeps spreading out, and needs more care. I'm not as young as I was I shall be sixty-four in October--and I can't work right along as I used to. I find that I come later and go away earlier. It isn't the 'work exactly, but the oversight, the details; and the fact is that I want somebody near me whom I can trust, whether I'm here or whether I'm away. I've got good, honest, faithful clerks--if there was one I did not trust, I wouldn't have him about. But do you know, Jack," it was the first time in the interview that he had used this name--"there is something in blood."

"Yes," Jack assented.

"Well, I want a confidential clerk. That's it."

"Me?" he asked. He was thinking rapidly while Mr. Fletcher had been speaking; something like a revolution was taking place in his mind, and when he asked this, the suggestion took on a humorous aspect--a humorous view of anything had not occurred to him in months.

"You are just the man."

"I can be confidential," Jack rejoined, with the old smile on his face that had been long a stranger to it, "but I don't know that I can be a clerk."

Mr. Fletcher was good enough to laugh at this pleasantry.

"That's all right. It isn't much of a position. We can make the salary twenty-five hundred dollars for a starter. Will you try it?"

Jack got up and went to the area window, and looked out a moment upon the boxes in the dim court. Then he came back and stood by Mr. Fletcher, and put his hand on the desk.

"Yes, I'll try."

"Good. When will you begin?"

"Now."

"That's good. No time like now. Wait a bit, and I'll show you about the place before we go to lunch. You'll get hold of the ropes directly."

This was Mr. Fletcher's veteran joke.

At three o'clock Mr. Fletcher closed his desk. It was time to take his train. "Tomorrow, then," he said, "we will begin in earnest."

"What are the business hours here?" asked Jack.

"Oh, I am usually here from ten to three, but the business hours are from nine till the business is done. By-the-way, why not run out with me and spend the night, and we can talk the thing over?"

There was no reason why he should not go, and he went. And that was the way John Corlear Delancy was initiated in the string business in the old house of Fletcher & Co.

XXII

Few battles are decisive, and perhaps least of all those that are won by a sudden charge or an accident, and not as the result of long-maturing causes. Doubtless the direction of a character or a career is often turned by a sudden act of the will or a momentary impotence of the will. But the battle is not over then, nor without long and arduous fighting, often a dreary, dragging struggle without the excitement of novelty.

It was comparatively easy for Jack Delancy in Mr. Fletcher's office to face about suddenly and say yes to the proposal made him. There was on him the pressure of necessity, of his own better nature acting under a sense of his wife's approval; and besides, there was a novelty that attracted him in trying something absolutely new to his habits.

But it was one thing to begin, and another, with a man of his temperament, to continue. To have regular hours, to attend to the details of a traffic that was to the last degree prosaic, in short, to settle down to hard work, was a very different thing from the "business" about which Jack and his fellows at the club used to talk so much, and to fancy they were engaged in. When the news came to the Union that Delancy had gone into the house of Fletcher & Co. as a clerk, there was a general smile, and a languid curiosity expressed as to how long he would stick to it.

In the first day or two Jack was sustained not only by the original impulse, but by a real instinct in learning about business ways and details that were new to him. To talk about the business and about the markets, to hear plans unfolded for extension and for taking advantage of fluctuations in prices, was all very well; but the drudgery of details --copying, comparing invoices, and settling into the routine of a clerk's life, even the life of a confidential clerk--was contrary to the habits of his whole life. It was not to be expected that these habits would be overcome without a long struggle and many back-slidings.

The little matter of being at his office desk at nine o'clock in the morning began to seem a hardship after the first three or four days. For Mr. Fletcher not to walk into his shop on the stroke of ten would have been such a reversal of his habits as to cause him as much annoyance as it caused Jack to be bound to a fixed hour. It was only the difference in training. But that is saying everything.

Besides, while the details of his work, the more he got settled in them, were not to his taste, he was daily mortified to find himself ignorant of matters which the stupidest clerk in the office seemed to know by instinct. This acted, however, as a sort of stimulus, and touched his pride. He determined that he would not be humiliated in this way, and during office hours he worked as diligently as Mr. Fletcher could have desired. He had pledged himself to the trial, and he summoned all his intelligence to back his effort.

And it is true that the satisfaction of having a situation, of doing something, the relief to the previous daily anxiety and almost despair, raised his spirits. It was only when he thought of the public opinion of his little world, of some other occupation more befitting his education, of the vast change from his late life of ease and luxury to this of daily labor with a clerk's pay, that he had hours of revolt and cursed his luck.

No, Jack's battle was not won in a day, or a week, or a year. And before it was won he needed more help than his own somewhat irresolute will could give. It is the impression of his biographer that he would have failed in the end if he had been married to a frivolous and selfish woman.

Mr. Fletcher was known as a very strict man of business, and as little else. But he was a good judge of character, and under his notions of discipline and of industry he was a kindly man, as his clerks, who feared his sharp oversight, knew. And besides, he had made a compact with Edith, for whom he had something more than family affection, and he watched Jack's efforts to adjust himself to the new life with sympathy. If it was an experiment for Jack, it was also an experiment for him, the result of which gave him some anxiety. The situation was not a very heroic one, but a life is often decided for good or ill by as insignificant a matter as Jack's ability to persevere in learning about the twine and cordage trade. This was a day of trial, and the element of uncertainty in it kept both Mr. Fletcher and Jack from writing of the new arrangement to Edith, for fear that only disappointment to her would be the ultimate result. Jack's brief notes to her were therefore, as usual, indefinite, but with the hint that he was beginning to see a way out of his embarrassment.

After the passage of a couple of weeks, during which Mr. Fletcher had been quietly studying his new clerk, he suddenly said to him, one Saturday morning, after they had looked over and estimated the orders by the day's mail, "Jack, I think you'd better let up a little, and run down and see Edith."

"Oh!" said Jack, a little startled by the proposal, but recovering himself; "I didn't suppose the business could spare me."

"I didn't mean a vacation, but run down for over Sunday. It must be lovely there, and the change will make you as keen as a brier for business. It always does me. Stay over Monday if the weather is good. I have to be away myself the week after." As Jack hesitated and did not reply, Mr. Fletcher continued:

"I really think you'd better go, Jack. You have hardly had a breath of fresh air this summer. There's plenty of time to go up-town and get your grip and catch the afternoon train."

Jack was still silent. The thought of seeing Edith created a tumult in his mind. It seemed as if he were not quite ready, not exactly settled. He had been procrastinating so long, putting off going, on one pretext or another, that he had fallen into a sort of fear of going. At first, absorbed in his speculations, enthralled by the company of Carmen and the luxurious, easy-going view of life that her society created for him; he had felt Edith and his house as an irritating restraint. Later, when the smash came, he had been still more relieved that she was out of town. And finally he had fallen into a reckless apathy, and had made himself believe that he never would see her again until some stroke of fortune should set him on his feet and restore his self-respect.

But since he had been with Fletcher & Co. his feelings had gradually undergone a change. With a regular occupation and regular hours, and in contact with the sensible mind and business routine of Mr. Fletcher, he began to have saner views of life, and to realize that Edith would approve what he was now attempting to do much more than any effort to relieve himself by speculation.

As soon as he felt himself a little more firmly established, a little more sure of himself, he would go to Edith, and confess everything, and begin life anew. This had been his mood, but he was still irresolute, and it needed some outside suggestion to push him forward to overcome his lingering reluctance to go home.

But this had come suddenly. It seemed to him at first thought that he needed time to prepare for it. Mr. Fletcher pulled out his watch. "There is a later train at four. Take that, and we will get some lunch first."

An hour of postponement was such a relief! Why, of course he could go at four. And instantly his heart leaped up with desire.

"All right," he said, as he rose and closed his desk. "But I think I'd better not stay for lunch. I want to get something for the boy on my way uptown."

"Very good. Tuesday, then. My best regards to Edith."

As Jack came down the stairway from the elevated road at Twenty-third Street he ran against a man who was hurrying up--a man in a pronounced traveling-suit, grip-sack and umbrella in hand, and in haste. It was Mavick. Recognition was instantaneous, and it was impossible for either to avoid the meeting if he had desired to do so.

"You in town!" said Mavick.

"And you!" Jack retorted.

"No, not really. I'm just going to catch the steamer. Short leave. We have all been kept by that confounded Chile business."

"Going for the government?"

"No, not publicly. Of course shall confer with our minister in London. Any news here?"

"Yes; Henderson's dead." And Jack looked Mavick squarely in the face.

"Ah!" And Mavick smiled faintly, and then said, gravely: "It was an awful business. So sudden, you know, that I couldn't do anything." He made a movement to pass on. "I suppose there has been no--no--"